7. The Pseudo Scientific Visualizer

"Darkness fell in from every side, a sphere of singing
black, pressure on the extended crystal nerves of the universe of data he
had nearly become... And when he was nothing, compressed at the heart of
all that dark, there came a point where the dark could be no more, and something
tore. The Kuang program spurted from tarnished cloud, Case's consciousness
divided like beads of mercury, arcing above an endless beach the color of
the dark silver clouds. His vision was spherical, as though a single retina
lined the inner surface of a globe
that contained all things, if all things could be counted. "

The Pseudo Scientific Visualizer is the object browser for the other half
of your brain, a fish-eye lens for the macroscopic examination of data.
It can display arbitrarily large, arbitrarily deep structures, in a fixed
amount of space. It shows form, texture, density, depth, fan out, and complexity.

It draws a compound object as a circle, then recursively draws its elements,
scaled smaller, in an evenly spaced ring, rotated around the circle. The
deeper an object, the smaller it is. It will only draw to a certain depth,
which you can change while the drawing is in progress.

It has simple graphical icons for different data types. An array is a circle,
and a dictionary is a circle with a dot. The icon for a string is a line,
whose length depends on the length of the string. A name is a triangle.
A boolean is a peace sign or an international no sign. An event is an envelope.
A process is a Porsche.

It randomly forks off several light weight processes, to draw different
parts of the display, so there is lots of drawing going on in different
places at once, and the overlapping is less regular.

After the drawing is complete, the circular compound objects become mouse
sensitive, selectable targets. The targets are implemented as round transparent
NeWS canvases. When you move the cursor over one, it highlights, and you
can click on it to zoom in, pop up a description of it, open up another
view of it, or select it, and then push it onto the stack of the PSIBER
Space Deck.